Help with Hotlist settings - Today + Overdue

Forgive me if this has been asked before. I tried searching the forums and found nothing, although I find it hard to believe that this has never been asked.

The customizable lists created with saved searches are great, but I have never understood why the Hotlist isn't that customizable to begin with. Because the Hotlist can be emailed to me daily and I'd like to get a useful email that doesn't list every task on my list, I keep trying to work with the settings to get the results to be everything due today + overdue items.

My Hotlist settings are Priority = medium and Days = 1. An FAQ on how to set up a Hotlist says, "Tasks with a future start-date will be hidden from the hotlist regardless of their priority, due-date, status or star." So, I start adding start dates to all my tasks in an effort to filter out future tasks, but all of my tasks still appear on the Hotlist.

Can anyone tell me how to get this set up to show today's tasks + overdue tasks, once and for all? I've spent so much time trying to figure this out on my own.

The start-date will only hide the task if it is more than 1 week out. Otherwise, the "priority=medium" setting that you have is causing every medium task to appear on the list. If you don't want this, then you can increase this to to a higher level to match fewer tasks.

The problem with that suggestion for me is that I use priority settings to establish which items to do first on a given day. To use the method you're suggesting, I would need to set everything to a higher level for each day as the day started or the night before. I don't want to take the time to re-prioritize items every day. I need automation, not one more thing to mess with.

Either I need to discipline myself to check the saved search I have set up more regularly (a daily email would have been the perfect reminder) or I need to find another app. I've been using ToodleDo Pro for a couple of years and thought this was the last list app I'd ever need.

The problem with that suggestion for me is that I use priority settings to establish which items to do first on a given day. To use the method you're suggesting, I would need to set everything to a higher level for each day as the day started or the night before. I don't want to take the time to re-prioritize items every day. I need automation, not one more thing to mess with.

I disabled the priority field and set the due date to 1 and star = on for my hotlist and found that worked pretty much how you want it to. The problem with this is that you are using the priority field as your sort order. Maybe if you can work around this, the hotlist will become more functional for you?